12/05/07 "ICH" -- -- The sweeping constitutional reforms
proposed by President Hugo Chavez that would “open the path to 21st
century socialism” were rejected on Sunday’s dramatic
referendum in Venezuela. But the devil, of course, is in the
details, largely overlooked by global corporate media.
The “Yes” lost to the “No”, as Chavez himself
identified, essentially because of a low turnout. According
to Venezuela's National Electoral
Council the No got 50.7% and the Yes 49.3%, with a 44%
abstention.

Crucially, what this means is that roughly one-third of
Venezuela wants to forge towards democratic socialism no
matter what; one-third prefers to remain under the standard
liberal capitalist system; and one-third has not made up
their minds yet, or was just too busy surviving to bother to
vote. This de facto three-way tie, in itself, is also a
major political earthquake. In virtually every country in
South America, except fierce US ally Colombia, a similar
referendum might yield similar results. The world is
definitely not flat.

The
(red) devil will bounce back. Chavez, perhaps more than
anyone, knows how the radical but peaceful battle for more
social justice – not only in South America, but globally -
will be a long and winding road. After suffering his first
defeat in no less than seven elections spanning almost nine
years he could not but concede, sensibly, that his sweeping
reforms were stalled, “for now.” At the Miraflores palace in
Caracas, he said he would never be satisfied with such a
Phyrric victory, with the slimmest of margins. Add to it his
graceful acceptance of the popular verdict. No rigging. No
attempts at disenfranchising voters. No “hanging chads”. No
soap opera in a Supreme Court to overturn a result. No
military coup.

Me rich, you poor, and
that’s it

Global corporate media’s
monomaniac, hysterical blitzkrieg was that a victory of the
Yes would have allowed Chavez, a “power-hungry autocrat”, to
be re-elected for life. If the Yes had won, that’s the proof
there’s no democracy in Venezuela. But the NO has won – to
global corporate media’s thunderous embarassment. This means
only when Chavez loses there’s democracy in Venezuela.

The presidential re-election
for more than two terms was just one among 69 constitutional
reform proposals to socialize political and economic
relations in Venezuela. The reforms would have given more
power to communal councils; reduced daily working hours from
8 to 6 hours (thus creating 200,000 extra jobs for
“informal” workers); enshrined an array of social programs
in the constitution; and allowed pensions to housewives and
informal workers. Any progressive individual in any global
latitude and under any political regime is able to recognize
that these Venezuelan reforms
were a huge step ahead in terms of social inclusion,
participatory democracy, alternative (non-neoliberal)
economic development, and a more effective central
government. Reform, not revolution; the Chavez government
itself stressed this was a “transition” towards “21st
century socialism”, not the end of the road.

The overall purpose of the
revised constitution was wealth redistribution: more state
money to develop poor or neglected parts of the country –
while fighting back against local corruption. This is
something huge masses in South America, Africa, Asia or the
Middle East can easily relate to. The dozens of thousands
of “people’s councils” would be empowered. They are
actually the basis of Venezuela’s democratic socialism –
instrumental in empowering the huge masses of up-to-now
excluded blacks and Indians, referred to by local elites as
“monkeys”.

No wonder
the elites had to be afraid, very afraid. Venezuela’s
political class, be they self-styled “social democrats” or
demo-christians, has traditionally been among the most
savage, vile, crass and corrupt in the whole of Latin
America. This simple fact alone explains why almost 70 % of
the population of a country so rich in natural resources was
poor when Chavez was first elected in 1999. The difference
is that now the poor – in Venezuela and elsewhere in South
America – have understood true democracy has nothing to do
with what they had experienced in the past.

To the
horror of Milton Friedman acolytes, Washington Consensus
cheerleaders, structural adjustment practitioners and
assorted “disaster capitalism” neocons, Venezuela is a
country where peasant collectives are evolving into
cooperatives. Article 112 of the proposed new constitution
said the state would promote “different kinds of economic
enterprises” - private, mixed, or run by a local community –
with the target of “collective and cooperative construction
of a socialist economy.” If Chavez was Salvador Allende in
1973 Chile everybody knows how Washington would “liberate”
him.

Another article stated that at
least five million independent workers – up to now totally
unprotected – would have access to a guaranteed minimum
wage, social security, pensions and paid holidays. This
concerned masses of peasants, fishermen, taxi drivers,
hairdressers, housewives and domestic servants.

What the elites were terrified
of was not so much the possibility of Chavez being
re-elected for years; what they needed to defeat at any
price was the constitutional status of the ongoing social
justice/wealth redistribution project.

President Lula in Brazil, as
well as his Workers Party – one of the largest political
parties in the world – were very much in favor of the Yes,
in spite of marked differences with Chavez’s strategy and
non-stop “attack mode” political style. Lula is always
branded by Wall Street and US power elites as the
“acceptable” face of a progressive South American leader, in
contrast to (red) devil Chavez.

When
King Juan Carlos of Spain – who forgot that he reclaimed the
monarchy thanks to fascist dictator Francisco Franco - told
Chavez to “shut up” at the recent Ibero-American summit in
Chile, Lula tried to smooth things over by praising the
“democratic” character of the Bolivarian Republic. For Lula,
it’s perfectly acceptable for a President (or a Prime
Minister) to remain in power for more than a decade. He has
referred to European parliamentary democracies and long
mandates by Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Felipe
Gonzalez.

Lula’s
opinion anyway was drowned by
the vast corporate, center-right anti-Chavez front in
Brazil, which counts on Washington’s enthusiastic support
and tries by all means to frustrate the official Venezuelan
entry to the regional Mercosur common market.

Green and Red
Zones

This time
Chavez had to fight not only powerful business tycoons,
financial capital, the landowning class, the Catholic
Church, corrupt union leaders and myriad manifestations of
US muscle – mirrored in the formidable demonization-of-Chavez
global corporate media blitzkrieg; in sum, as Gramsci might
put it, a coalition of all the forces pertaining to the Old
Order.

He also
had to fight the inevitable erosion of an ongoing, slow
revolutionary process; the skepticism and most of all apathy
of “light Chavistas”, who were not sufficiently informed on
what Bolivarian socialism would look like; corruption
charges against sectors of the state apparatus; some
high-profile defections like his former Defense Minister
Raul Baduel and his ex-wife Marisabel Rodriguez; and most of
all a young, upper middle class, formerly apathetic student
movement.

There
was nothing about “the conscience of a country” in these
vocal student protests. A few students hailed from public
universities but most come from elite private universities
such as Andres Bello, the top Catholic university in
Caracas. Mirroring the color-coded revolutions in the former
Soviet sphere, student groups were lavished with funds from
the US Agency for International Development (USAID) under
the cloak of “conflict resolution” or “democracy promotion”.
But as much as the Bush administration may be eager to
instrumentalize them, the fact is the absolute majority of
university students in Venezuela still support Chavez.

The
polarization of the whole country is more than glaring in
Caracas, with upper-class Altamira, who voted overwhelmingly
No, contraposed to the hilly, crowded January 23 neighborhod,
who voted overwhelmingly Yes. It’s the perfect metaphor of a
world divided into Green Zones and Red Zones. In the Green
Zone people are avidly consumerist and their idea of
paradise is Miami. In the Red Zone people benefit from the
work of a mision
– a social program to bring secondary education to poor
areas.

In the
Red Zone - with most of its walls painted red, splashed with
pictures of Bolivar, Chavez and Che Guevara, and teemig with
self-described “social militants” - a victory of the No is
interpreted as a defeat for all of Latin America. In the
Green Zone it’s interpreted as the last gasp to stop the
revolution – equaled to dictatorship - in its tracks. Had
the No lost most of Altamira would have boarded the first
flight to Miami.

So
many enemies, so little time

Argentine political scientist
Atilio A. Boron has characterized the referendum as a
“baptism of fire” to see how crucial transformations in
Latin America – the most unequal region in the world in
terms of social justice - may be implemented: peacefully or
violently. We’re not there - yet.

If Chavez
– at least for a while – lost basically to voter apathy, a
ruthless Plan B was already in the works, echoing the dark
days of the US-backed or engineered 1970s dictatorships.
Less than a week before the referendum the CIA-orchestrated
Operation Pincer was unmasked by Venezuelan intelligence,
with its emphasis on instantly disallowing a majority Yes
vote by claiming fraud and then pushing towards a coup. As
Boron stresses, “imperialism does not admit changes, either
by the insurrectional or the institutional way”.

Before
the referendum Chavez had insisted that “To vote ‘yes’, is
a vote for Chavez and the revolution, to vote ‘No’ is a vote
for Bush”. This might have been essentially true to many
(not only in Venezuela but all over Latin America) but
tactically it was a huge mistake. Chavez may have insisted
“Our true enemy is US imperialism” but in fact he made no
effort to convince at least part of what he terms “the pawns
of imperialism” – corrupt Venezuelan elites.

The
elites for their part made the best use of a lot of
propaganda money from the US embassy in Caracas (US$ 8
million, according to an intercepted embassy memo),
unlimited free time on right-wing media, the power of the
Church, and the I-love-Miami student crowd while Chavez and
the government machine were not able to convince a lot of
people that the reforms would not benefit Chavez more than
they would benefit the people. Thus a new political
phenomenon was born – the Chavista who votes No (estimated
at a huge 8 percentual points in the week before the vote,
according to the Datanalisis polling firm).

As late
as October the Yes was winning. But then the opposition
started banging on the Holy Grail – the article restricting
private property. On top of it Chavez had no political
opponent to battle with (“Imperialist” Bush, after all, is a
foreigner). So he fought Colombian President Alvaro Uribe
instead - a US-backed visceral right-winger, very close to
extreme right-wing paramilitaries, who unilaterally
terminated Chavez’s mediation to liberate hostages in power
of the Marxist FARC guerrillas in Colombia (the Bush
administration would never allow Uribe to allow Chavez such
a worldwide PR success). The problem is there are one
million Colombians living in Venezuela. They may well have
been the masses that tilted the vote towards the No.

I’ll
be back

Then again, this is just a
skirmish in a very long battle. Chavez, even in defeat,
emerges as the leader of a true democratic republic (even
people in France are comparing him favorably with
Bonapartist Nicolas Sarkozy). Chavez will take the package
to Parliament approval and may call another referendum after
2010 (the new presidential election is in 2012). Washington
also won’t quit. The CIA didn’t have to deploy
Operation Pincer – at least for now.

As usual
the CIA was relying on bad HUMINT: the agency was counting
on a Yes victory by 57%, with 60% abstention. Anyway the US
destabilization effort this time was way more subtle than in
2002 when, after the US and
Spain-supported coup against the elected Chavez government,
the local elites forced an oil industry shutdown in which
US$ 10 billion of the Venezuelan economy went up in smoke.

Chavez
remains so popular all across the developing world because
he’s the man who spells out what everyone is thinking. Take,
for instance, the recent OPEC summit in Riyadh, where he was
side by side with another “devil”, Islamic revolutionary and
Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad: “The empire of the
dollar is crashing”. The next day, in Paris, after he
discussed with Sarkozy his mediation in the Colombian
hostages drama, he says that “Iran is a power and Venezuela
is becoming one. We want to create a bipolar world. We don't
want a single power.”

Most of all Chavez is so
dangerous for Washington and right-wing comprador elites in
Latin America because he is pushing, no holds barred,
towards democratic socialism. For Washington and Wall Street
elites this is way worse than the spectre of totalitarian
communism branded throughout the Cold War. Everyone in Latin
America remembers how Allende in the early 1970s was
demonized as a Stalinist dictator by a CIA-funded propaganda
campaign. But it was Henry Kissinger who got the whole
point, when he told then President Nixon how Allende had to
be taken out because he was such a bad example for the rest
of the developing world. Chavez is the 21st
century Allende. He has already survived a US-backed coup,
in 2002. And he knows others – the sons of Operation Pincer
- are in the works. Still, even
if the Yes had won, he would not have as much institutional
power as George Bush.

Meanwhile, expect the (red)
devil to be routinely pillored by global corporate media. Of
course there is crime, corruption and government waste in
Venezuela – like anywhere else. But the most important
point, from a global perspective, is to examine how the
Chavez experiment evolves, as a trial-and-error
revolutionary process, and if and how social justice is
spreading.

According
to the UN, in 2006 alone poverty in Venezuela fell from
37.1% to 30.2%. Extreme poverty fell from 15.9% to 9.9%.
Venezuela is on the way to reach its first Millennium
Development Goal. The No vote has not reversed what
eminent US Latin American expert James Petras describes as
“the most promising living experience of popular self-rule,
of advanced social welfare and democratically based
socialism.” The resistance – or micro-resistances, on
individual and small collective levels – continues. That’s
how the liliputians will eventually topple the neoliberal
Gulliver. You cant’ beat a (red) devil that easily.

Pepe Escobar is the roving
correspondent for Asia Times (www.atimes.com).
He's the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is
Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be
reached at
pepeasia@yahoo.com

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